This is a nice primer on Batteries. While working on Electrical vehicle project , where I was a novice as far as battery technology is concerned, I was bombarded with many of these terms. One fo the term often used was "Deep Discharge" batteries. Could you elaborate on this ?

Depth of Discharge (DOD) [%] The percentage of battery capacity that has been discharged, expressed as a percentage of maximum capacity. A discharge to at least 80% DOD is referred to as a deep discharge. Manufacturers make adjustments to the size and configuration of electrodes and chemistry, in order that there is less damage to cells when the battery is discharged to this high amount. Marine batteries are often of the deep-discharge type.

Thanks a lot for the information on Deep Discharge Batteries. Also it is said that the batteries have some kind of memory , which means it gets tuned to the charge/discharge pattern which is regularly used. If something out of the regular routine is tried later then the battery does not give optimum performance. e.g if you are doing only partial discharge every day and recharging again to full, then a sudden deep discharge may damage the battery.

The 'memory effect' was initially denied by manufacturers, but eventually they reversed their stand after good science showed that certain chemistries had a preference for a terminal voltage where the battery spent most of its time. It results in a loss of capacity, since the battery quickly drops its terminal voltage after discharging, to the 'memory' point. To compensate, manufacturers began recommending that batteries always should be discharged to the end-of-cycle point (not partially discharged and recharged). This idea ran counter to system designers wishes, since most of the energy-transfer losses happen at the end of the rated-discharge cycle. What you mentioned, though, happens often enough about the pattern of cycles and optimum performance, even outside of the memory effect. Some manufacturers now include mention of how their batteries perform with regard to the memory effect, in order to differentiate their product from the competition.

@eetcowie: The 'memory effect' was initially denied by manufacturers, but eventually they reversed their stand after good science showed that certain chemistries had a preference for a terminal voltage where the battery spent most of its time...

Will you be elaborating on this later in the series, and also telling us how to mitigate against it? For myself, in th ecase of my iPad, I usually let it run down to around 10% and then charge it all the way back up to 100%. By comparison ,in the case of my notepads, it's onlt every "now and again" that I turn them on without plugging them into the wall first -- is this OK?

I will cover more on the memory effect later, but for now, Max, there may not be a substantial memory effect on the type of battery in your device. Suffice to say that for each chemistry and construction combination, there exists an optimum charging and discharging electrical and physical environment that will yield the greatest service life. But a high service-life comes with trade-offs in other performance areas -- this is no surprise, since "...you don't get something for nothing", they say. I tend to have the thinking that when something is really good, I ask myself about what does it compromise? Some comedian once said, "You can't have everything. Where wuould you put it?"

While looking up information on solar power for recreation vehicles I came across some great information on wet cell lead acid, and although archaici technology I "m guessing the principles remain similar to other technologies.